Kid in yellow throws his head back.
“Just before Football Focus; I know you now. So you’re looking for the Dona.”
“I’ve something I want to show her. Something the Seu left behind.”
“I think I remember you now,” says the barman. “You did some interviews with her and his sisters. I saw them, they were good.” They all look at the emperor in white. He stubs out a cigarette.
“You’ll find her where you found her last time,” he says.
“It’s easy to get lost here,” says Kid Green “I’ll show you.” He casts off from the bar and leads by two steps behind through the labyrinth of alleys and tunnels. I’m sure I didn’t go this way before, I’m sure it was straighter, less shadowed. But the house are built and rebuilt and the streets change so often up here it’s as if they move themselves, in the night. We drill down into the roots of Vila Canoas, through a doorway skewed into a parallelogram and along a short concrete tunnel lined with television-lit windows. The sound of running water rushes around the corridor. We cross the buried stream that races down from Sao Conrado on a concrete culvert and climb a flight of steps towards the sun. It’s there that I hear the once-heard never-mistaken sound and turn to face the gun in Green Boy’s hand.
“Look, I’m just a journalist.” I offer him my wallet, my cellular. My cards he knows will be biometriced, usable only to my touch but I give them to him anyway. I pray he won’t kidnap and march me to an ATM every day until I’ve emptied out my own account. Move slowly, withhold nothing and let them know they are in total control. I’ve been held up before. I know the drill.
“What’s in the pocket?” Green waves his gun barrel.
I think of denying, I think of lying but the square bulge of the drive betrays me. I take out the master disk carefully, between thumb and forefinger.
“It’s only music.”
“An iPod.”
“No it’s a hard drive.”
“An iPod, an MP4 player?”
“It’s for Dona de Araujo. Seu Alejandro’s mother. It’s a present for her.”
“An iPod,” Green Boy says again. He’s chewing his lip repeatedly now. That’s never good.
“No it’s not an iPod.” I’m getting agitated. Give it to him. Give him whatever he wants. Get down on your knees and blow him if you need to. But it’s
“Give me the fucking iPod!” Green screams.
“It’s not a fucking iPod!” I scream back over the gurgle of buried water. I pull my hand back. He stabs forward with the gun. I see his finger close on the trigger.
And I hear a click. A dead-gun click. Green Boy frowns. He stabs with the gun held sideways this time, pulls the trigger. I hear a click. Then another. Then another.
THE CRISTOBAL EFFECT
SIMON McCAFFERY
Simon McCaffery writes science fiction, horror, and hybrids of both genres, and has long been a fan of parallel worlds in fiction. His stories have appeared in
The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is
Intersecting Highway 466 is an unpaved county road. Four miles west is a second, more infamous Y intersection: state route 41, near Cholame. In arid, remote Cholame, working men and ranchers are returning home in rattling pickups and dust-coated sedans like so many wind-blown tumbleweeds.
The car’s mid-mounted 1.5 liter aluminum engine sings as it streaks toward me, gold rays of fading sunlight dancing along its sleek contours. It isn’t slowing. Does he think the detour signs and hissing flares are a mirage?
The trained physicist in me recognizes the irony: If I stand still and die, I prove I’ve entered a malleable universe, a Wobbly-Brane. If not, he’ll swerve to miss me instead of the Ford Tudor driven by a Cal Poly student, and die of internal injuries as he does in all the rigid-event universes. Like the one in which
Tires shriek and the Porsche 550 Spyder slews to a stop a foot from my knees. I stare at its eternally youthful driver: the go-to-hell hair, high forehead, jutting chin and those cool baby-blues squinting at me behind tinted aviator glasses. I can hear my own heart pounding in my ears.
The tiny car crouches only inches above the road. The driver and a darkhaired passenger stare up at me.
“What’s the emergency here, friend?”
“Detour,” I stutter, a B-actor suffering from stage fright.
The driver turns down the blaring radio.
“Say again?”
“
The passenger is his racing mechanic, Rolf Wutherich. Dead from a 1981 auto accident after several failed suicide attempts, he grins. “Taking the back roads was a bad idea. The girls will be mad if we’re late.”
The driver scrutinizes the truck parked on the opposite shoulder. The hand-painted letters on its flaking side read: MONTEREY COUNTY ROAD DEPT. Is he suspicious?
“You fellows in a hurry to get someplace?”
The driver cocks a finger. “Got a race to win up in Salinas tomorrow. Will that road get us back on the highway?”
I nod, pointing with the flag. “It’ll take you a few miles out of your way, but not far. Go six miles and take the first right. It’s that or go back the way you came.”
He removes his sunglasses and wipes road dust from the lenses on his white T-shirt. My mind records the tiny moon-shaped shaving cut along his chin; the way his hair curls back in carefree waves from his brow; the full, sensual lower lip, so like Brando’s.
“Thanks for the warning, fellow. Try to stay out of the middle of the road.”
He pops the race car named “Little Bastard” into gear and roars away into the twilight, the dry air whipping his hair, leaving a rooster tail of dust.
I wait ten minutes in the hot ticking silence to make certain he doesn’t double back.
Science fiction writers had it wrong. In rigid-event universes—an infinite paper-doll chain of Earths separated by a quantum frequency shift that only a Device can interpolate—a mysterious, immutable law binds everything down to the subatomic level of reality. Elasticity is limited. Visitors may alter only the most negligible of details. In an ordinary universe, no matter what story I fabricate he’ll get lost and return to find my barricade removed, and
